Body of IIT student recovered

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Guwahati, July 26: The body of Ravindra Kumar Meena, an IIT Guwahati student who drowned in the Brahmaputra on Monday, was recovered this morning at Amingaon in north Guwahati, around 3km downstream from where he went missing.

Residents who had gone to bathe at Post Office ghat this morning spotted the body of the 20-year-old circling in a whirlpool around 5. They informed Pandu river police outpost from where policemen reached the spot and fished out the body.

Family members of Meena took his body to Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport here after autopsy at Gauhati Medical College and Hospital, to take him home for cremation. “I just want to take his body home,” the victim’s father, Ratan Singh, told this correspondent, before the body was taken out of the morgue.

Sources in IIT Guwahati said airline officials refused to carry the “decomposed” body on the flight, after which the family members decided to cremate him at the Bhootnath crematorium here.

The victim, who hailed from Dholpur in Rajasthan, was a seventh semester student of the mechanical engineering department in the IIT. He drowned in the river when he went to take a dip around 9.30pm on Monday.

Meena was partying with his friends near the river and he along with two friends, entered the water around 7pm. Police said there were beer bottles lying around at the spot. Residents, however, managed to rescue his friends — Vineet Bhargav and Chiraag.

A source in IIT Guwahati said punitive action might be taken against the two students who were with Meena on the day.

The river is just a few metres from the institution.

Since 2011, more than 50 people have drowned in the stretch of the Brahmaputra between Amingaon and Soonsali.